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Hersh suggests that Kennedy deserves some of the blame for triggering the Cuban missile crisis because of his secret plotting against Castro, which the Cuban leader knew about, even if most Americans did not. "The overriding deceit--one that still distorts the history of those 13 days--was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Castro and destroy his regime," Hersh writes. "Kennedy did not dare tell the full story of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because it was his policies that brought the weapons there." This is an interesting theory, but it's plucked out of thin air. Hersh goes on to argue that amid the "fanaticism" exhibited by both J.F.K. and Castro, only Khrushchev had the level-headedness to end this game of nuclear chicken by offering to pull the missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy's pledge not to invade. In fact, as recently released tapes reveal, Kennedy was very level-headed himself and pushed the strategy of trading in Jupiter missiles in Turkey in order to defuse the crisis. In the book, Hersh turns this around and treats this deal (which, by the way, was acknowledged in 1987 by Kennedy's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk) as shocking.
Swinging to the other side of the globe, Hersh alleges that J.F.K. knew that South Vietnam's President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother would be assassinated as a consequence of the Washington-approved coup that toppled Diem in 1963. Hersh's smoking gun is the fact that Kennedy summoned former Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, an ex-CIA operative who had been involved in the U.S. assassination plots against Castro, and asked if he would go to Saigon and help "get rid" of Diem. Lansdale says he turned down the President's invitation. Was Kennedy making a thinly veiled request for Diem's head? Historian Schlesinger makes the pertinent point: "When politicians talk about getting rid of someone, this does not mean they want to murder them."
Journalism is often called the first, rough draft of history. In some ways The Dark Side of Camelot is just that. Hersh has done the spadework that the writing of history requires, but it also requires judgment, prudence and a willingness to be satisfied sometimes with ambiguous conclusions when human nature (and the best-seller list) prefers the comfort of certainties.
Hersh writes with the passion and single-mindedness of an investigator. He wants us to believe that he reached to the hidden heart of the matter with just about every thrust he made into Kennedy territory. To a reader who gets to his last page, it doesn't often feel that way. The full story of John Kennedy is still being built out of intricate pieces. Dark Side adds a few more of them. But both the man and the book should come with a label that reads FURTHER ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
--Reported by Adam Cohen, Ratu Kamlani, Elizabeth Rudulph/New York and Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson/Washington